iOS 9.3 Night Shift Mode Compatible iPhone, iPad, iPod touch Devices

Apple’s seeding of iOS 9.3 beta 1 to registered developers and testers represents a fairly significant improvement to the iOS platform. Rather than acting as an evolutionary update that focuses on performance and security enhancements, iOS 9.3 actually introduces a number of new features that take the iOS experience up a gear. One of those features is Night Shift – a feature that shifts the colors of the Retina display to the warmer end of the spectrum based on time and location. But exactly which devices will support this new feature?

Those investigating the new inclusions within iOS 9.3 will automatically assume that everything added will be compatible with any iOS device capable of supporting iOS 9. In under normal circumstances that would largely be true, but we have seen Apple introduce functionality in the past that excludes older hardware even though the device is deemed as “compatible” with the firmware. This is one of those instances, with Apple’s new Night Shift feature discriminating against the company’s older, 32-bit CPU-powered devices.

That means if you’re an owner of the iPhone 4s, fifth-generation iPod touch, iPhone 5, or one of Apple’s brightly colored iPhone 5c handsets then you won’t be able to make advantage of Night Shift upon public launch. Those with the original iPad mini or an iPad 2/3/4 will also be excluded due to Apple deeming that the hardware simply isn’t capable of handling the feature whilst maintaining important performance parameters.